Market Manila

I spotted these really pale cucumbers at the market the other day and couldn’t resist purchasing them. July seems to be the month that cucumbers appear big time in the markets…not sure if that coincides with the phenomenal volume of water pouring out of the sky at this time of the year…cucumbers, are, after all, almost entirely made up of water… At any rate, I wrote about the many different kinds of cucumbers I found at the market last July, and followed that up with a simple recipe for a cucumber salad with a “Visayan Vinaigrette.” Typically, folks would classify cucumbers into three groups…many seedless ones that are often grown in greenhouses in the West (these would include Japanese, Asian and European varieties, pickling cucumbers which are fatter and pudgier, and the dark green cucumbers that we normally use for salads. I wasn’t sure where these albino cucumbers fit in. They could be mutated pickling cucumbers or blond salad cukes… I like to think of them as our “dugong” or manatee cukes because their shape and color remind me of these massive sea cows… I know several readers have asked about these cukes in the past, but I have never used them in a recipe. Do you have any ideas what I can use them for before they lose their freshness hanging out in my refrigerator’s vegetable drawer?

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Marketman has a dinuguan phobia. There. I finally admitted it. Hopefully that is the first step to a cure. I used to love dinuguan as a kid. That was before I rudely found out what it was made of. One day, still in my single digits, I entered the kitchen just as my mom was pouring some thick dark liquid out of a plastic bag and into the pot with stuff in it. I asked what it was and she said it was “pig’s blood.” WHAT?! The thick liquid in the dinuguan was cooked pig’s blood??? I probably turned ashen and quickly retreated out of there. I have a thing about blood. It makes me faint. I once accompanied my sister to the Emergency Room of Makati Med when she cut her toe from an exploding coke bottle and as they were sewing it up I promptly keeled over (fainted) and they had to revive me outside the Emergency Room. When my daughter gets bloody injuries, the same thing happens. I knew I couldn’t be a doctor at age 8. My brother-in-law once took us fishing off the Long Island, New York shoreline and they started chumming with fish guts which promptly made me upchuck some of my own… so, no, this dinuguan thing is an imbeded and highly irrational thing. I couldn’t be reincardnated as a vampire. Or vampire bat for that matter.

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Here is the Mediterranean counterpart to the Asian version in the previous post on fish cooked in paper. In this version, place the fish fillet in the center of parchment paper resting on some thinly sliced whole lemons, sliced garlic, white onions and chopped tomatoes. Season the fish generously with salt and pepper. On top pile on some sliced tomatoes, onions, garlic, capers, fresh thyme or other herbs such as dried basil or oregano and add some olives (I used nicoise olives in some of my iterations) and sliced grilled red capsicum or sweet bell peppers if you have them. If you can afford the fat, I add some of the marinating oil for the grilled peppers on top of the fish. Bake this or steam it as described in the previous post.

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When I feel like I have just completely “porked out” during the previous week or so, I get the “guilts” and try to eat a little bit more healthily for a meal or two. When you think that putting on say 7 or 8 pounds, which I can do in about 2 weeks if I eat everything I want, is the same as attaching 3 raw Magnolia chickens to your waist with strapping tape, then you realize you have to behave… One of my signature dishes for the Marketman “South Forbes Diet” is some fish fillet “en cartoccio”. Essentially, this means a no fuss, no muss, low effort dish cooked in some parchment paper. I have two versions…an Asian one and a Mediterranean version. Here is the Asian version…

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I have loved macapuno candy for as long as I can remember… those gelatinous, sugar coated morsels of macapuno would range from really soft and flavorful versions to firmer, more opaque concoctions. As I got older, I ate less and less of this candy and now only get a taste for it once in a while. However, I have noticed an incredible decline in the quality of commercially purchased macapuno balls. In the last few years, some of the ones I bought were downright gross. Many are nearly hard as rocks, too paste-y, lacking in flavor, too dense and just a shadow of what I recall them to be… Since I had just acquired two macapuno nuts, I figured I would attempt to make some candy for myself…

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For as long as I can remember, I have really liked macapuno candy. I also liked macapuno tarts, macapuno ice cream and macapuno strings in halo-halo. But now that I think about it, I have never actually seen a macapuno! Have you? So when I saw these husked coconuts for sale at the market the other day with a sign that said Macapuno or Makapuno, how could I resist? They looked exactly like a regular coconuts but they seemed to weight more and felt less hollow. At PHP40 per piece, they were way pricier than say the PHP8-10 regular coconuts… Macapuno nuts are actually aberrant coconuts. Nuts whose genetics short-circuited along the way and whose fruit are delightfully different from a regular coconut.

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Humba or Umba is the Visayan answer to adobo from the North…or is it? Although I was born in Cebu and lived there until the ripe old age of 2, I don’t really recall eating too much humba in my childhood years or even as an adult. Humba recipes vary from household to household but it does seem to be incredibly close to some Chinese treatment for pork, as in pata tim, or slow braised pork with soy and star anise. I have never made humba before, though our cook makes it occasionally for the crew and it rarely makes it to the dining table… we tend to get adobo instead. I set out to find a nice recipe and ended up using ingredients and methods from several different sources. I was initially perturbed by the amount of sugar in this preparation, but the results were delicious. There are two rough versions of this…one that is more strongly influenced by Chinese cookery and one that has evolved into a more “common” way of preparing it. Here is the recipe I made, and I would definitely make it again…

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Some of my previous posts need an update since most readers don’t troll back several weeks and dozens of posts ago…

Price Smart (and apparently Cost U Less) has apparently closed its doors to customers… If you read this seemingly innocuous post on Price Smart that I put about two months ago, and followed the rather lively reader reaction it elicited, you will know that the likely closure had some serious writing on the wall… thank goodness I didn’t renew the three cards we have in our household. I feel terribly for the employees who will be out of a job but I do not feel sorry at all for the management who must have brought this on themselves. What a sad example of how the first beneficiary of the much fought for liberalization of the Philippine retail laws has now gone totally kaput!

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